hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
Science Is Not Always Progress
"A civilization which moves massively in any direction without conscious self-control is in disordered flight as if pursued by enemy hordes" - John Ralston Saul: Voltaire's Bastards.As Australian society rushes in leaps and bounds to rationalise all aspects of life into a standardised, efficient and production-line type of affair be it buildings, public spaces, music, politics, public debate, education and other essential services, it appears at the same time to possess the slightly related belief that scientific advancement is unquestionably good or that such advancement, by itself and devoid of what it achieves, reflects genuine social progress absolutely.
The scientific revolution which caught on around 500 hundred years ago in response to holistic minded folk wanting to find out about the true the nature of our world as opposed to the religious interpretation of it has unintentionally left us with the obsessive belief that "invention and change are virtues". Thus we feel it more necessary to flee, for the sake of it, into the in fact uncertain and untested future to solve many of our social problems as opposed to simply looking to the knowable and already-tested past.
We live by the near unspoken understanding that the dynamic and many-faced nature of a society is to be guided to a large degree by various scientists, or people who are rational experts in only one narrow field. At the same time we have grown be very suspicious of the notion of the civic-minded person of broad culture and understanding, who links everything together in the social context, and also of the 'conservative' person - where ever they rear their heads, as both these sorts are perceived as aiming to usher us onto the 'regressive' path back into the 'dark' past.
Indeed we seem hasty to jump onto the bandwagon of any new scientific and technological development: be it in the field of genetics, agriculture, machinery/computing, pharmaceuticals, socializing, and even boredom alleviation/entertainment, often simply because the development has recently arisen. But do we examine closely enough both the known and, more insidiously, the as yet unknown negative consequences to human dignity, health, social awareness, and imagination that stem from such scientific developments?
What I feel we fail to acknowledge, yet again as society, is that like the mental tool of pure human rationality, science and technology are merely means, or tools, to achieve ends. Only a confused society would mistake them for ends in themselves.
By David